Fatḥ-nāma

(346 words)

The religious epic Fatḥ-nāma (Book of Conquest), written by the Judeo-Persian poet ʿImrānī in the late fifteenth century as a masnavī (narrative poem in rhyming couplets), begins with the conquest of the Holy Land by Joshua. Consisting of approximately ten thousand couplets, it claims to treat events from Joshua to the reign of Solomon, but no known manuscript confirms that the poet completed this task. The existing manuscripts set the biblical account in classical Persian verse, including the books of Ruth, I Samuel, and the fi…